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Men - Obsolete or Indispensable?

Louis Prats tells this story. " 'Daddy, draw me a spider,' said my two-year-old daughter. So I drew her a massive spider with eight huge, hairy legs. 'Draw me an airplane,' she said. So I drew a large airliner. `Now draw Daddy.' So I drew a man with a washboard stomach, Popeye-like muscles, and a chiseled chin. After admiring it for a few seconds, she said, 'Now, draw my daddy' " (Readers Digest, 9/05, p 129). He drew a picture based on his fantasy but she wanted him to draw based on the facts! There is often a gap between fantasy and fact when it comes to daddies and husbands (and also mothers and wives)! Perfect ones do not exist. That being said, good men do exist, in spite of the diminished and demoralizing way many in our culture depict and characterize men in general. Male-bashing came into vogue decades ago when radical feminists began to define and depict women and men as competitors with one another instead of complimentary to one another. There has been a prolific amount of philosophical "sowing to the wind" and now we watch as our culture "reaps the whirlwind" of distorted thinking and behavior (Hosea 8:7). Society has undergone a dangerous disconnect with common sense and Biblical teaching about gender differences and the unique roles and responsibilities of men and women, especially in marriage and parenting and the church. Powerful personalities and politicians in our land, including the current President of the United States, are now unwilling to define marriage the way the Bible does — as a Goddesi gned relationship between a man and a woman, ideally to last a life time (Genesis 2:18ff; Matthew 19:1-9). God's plan for marriage and the home and the church requires two complimentary but distinctive components — males and females — and no amount of pompous pontificating to the contrary by a high and mighty judge or court, a church council, a president, popular practice, or pop culture personalities can change that fundamental fact. In God's plan each gender has a unique and God-given work to do.

In the middle of moral confusion and controversy there occasionally come words worth noting from unexpected sources. Consider Camille Paglia. Paglia is an American academic and social critic and a self-described "dissident feminist." Although a lesbian, her criticisms of modern feminism have angered many radical feminists. In her TIME article (12/30/13; p 26), "2013: The Year Men Became Obsolete?", she wrote: "Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees and bulldozing the landscape. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of 50-story skyscrapers . . . Surely women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!" Men may be obsolete in the perverted, fuzzy thinking of a world out of touch with God. But God's plan calls for men who will not abandon their call to love their wives and lead their children to faith in God (Ephesians 5:21-6:4). Such men will never be obsolete or replaced with la "same-sex" substitute. God give us more of these men.